Family is where you find it. For restaurant people, family is often the people at work: Method-actor captains and decent-sculptor waiters; tattooed chefs de partie, willowy hostesses, bookish sommeliers and the four cousins from Puebla who keep the whole enterprise afloat. They gather once a day in the dining room, well before your dinner, to eat their own.

This repast is the staff meal, known in many restaurants as family meal. A family meal might be prepared by a young kitchen lieutenant, or by an eager baker. It might be cooked by a kitchen backbencher with a special hand for fried chicken, for Dominican beef stew, for pizza. Whichever, it offers a chance for a team of people who are deeply reliant on one another to sit and talk and eat, unencumbered by duty, before they work.

And it is important, restaurant people say. If the family meal is lackluster, the service that follows may be as well. A stellar family meal can inspire. It can make a minor celebrity of the staff member who made it. People hunger for a particular dish to come up again on the rotation. They come to work early. Sometimes, as with the “meats on a stick” dinner that Jimmy Bradley serves at the Harrison in Manhattan, which converts the trimmings from the restaurant’s butchering station into kebabs for the staff, the dish becomes so popular that it ends up on the menu.

“Mexican Day” is the most popular staff meal at the French Laundry in Yountville, Calif., said Michael Minnillo, the general manager there. When he was working as a captain at Per Se in New York, the favorite was Middle Eastern. For special occasions, he said, “like opening anniversaries, we’ll treat ourselves: In-N-Out Burger at the French Laundry, Shake Shack at Per Se.”

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Credit
Marcus Nilsson for The New York Times. Food stylist: Chris Lanier.

At Underbelly in Houston, where Chef Chris Shepherd cooks the robust flavors of modern coastal Texas, the staff goes nuts for beef pho. At the Darby, a Manhattan supper club, Chef Alexandra Guarnaschelli said the most popular family meals are Colombian, reflecting the heritage of one of her cooks: spicy chicken-and-orzo soup with garlic and cilantro; braised chicken thighs with ginger and tomatoes.

Family meals are taken especially seriously at the restaurants of Danny Meyer’s Union Square Hospitality Group, among them Union Square Cafe, Gramercy Tavern, Blue Smoke and Maialino, all in Manhattan. Meyer’s business philosophy is what he has called “enlightened hospitality.” It requires, he has said, workers who believe that “caring for others is, in fact, a selfish act.” For such people, the sort of men and women who take the preparation of a dinner for dishwashers and bar backs just as seriously as one made for a paying senator or hedge-fund titan, family meal is a kind of sacrament.

Michael Romano, once the chef at Union Square Cafe and a partner in Meyer’s restaurant business, has a new book out about those meals, “Family Table: Favorite Staff Meals From Our Restaurants to Your Home.” In it, I came across a recipe for fish tacos that Chad Shaner, now the chef de cuisine of BLT Prime, made when he was a line cook at Union Square Cafe. It was, he reported shyly when I talked to him about it, one of the restaurant’s favorite family meals. “Everyone loves taco day,” he said.

The recipe is not really Mexican. Shaner hails from Smyrna, Del., and served in the Navy before he went to the Culinary Institute of America. He cooks a forceful kind of American food that borrows its flavors from wherever they are strongest. His fish tacos, he said, are something he cooked up one night with his brother, Andy, a bartender at the Manhattan whiskey mecca Maysville. “We were looking for intense flavor,” he said. Later he took the dish to work.

The fish — I made it best with cod, but Shaner says he has done well with flounder and tilapia too — is blackened in a version of a Cajun spice rub that deepens the sweet flavor of the white flesh. The cooked fillets are then cut or torn into pieces and served with warm corn tortillas, a chipotle-enhanced sour cream, government-style Cheddar, sliced radishes and a tangle of grilled scallions.

The dish went over like gangbusters at Union Square, and again and again in a Brooklyn home kitchen: the cooked fish laid out on sheet pans, with bowls of toppings and piles of toasted, warmed tortillas. The philosophy was simple and family-oriented: Roll your own.

A version of this article appears in print on June 2, 2013, on page MM48 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Team Taco. Today's Paper|Subscribe